We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.